This invention relates to an apparatus for heating food; and, more particularly, to an apparatus for controlled, quick and steam heating of pasta and sauce.
In the food industries, and especially restaurant industries, it is highly desirable to be able to heat a liquid, a solid food, or mixtures thereof quickly, while maintaining desirable eating characteristics. This combination of heating quickly and maintaining taste tends to be counter-productive. If the food is prepared in advance so that it can be heated quickly, some taste is lost during storage and reheating. By the same token, if the food is not prepared substantially in advance, quick and efficient reheating cannot occur. This is especially true in the case of pasta and sauce dishes. In pasta and sauce dishes, the heating must be done quickly and efficiently in order to achieve quick service. Yet such quick heating can destroy the desired flavor of such foods. It is highly desirable to find a method for quickly heating the foods while maintaining the flavor.
It is well known in the art that such foods can be reheated. The apparatus used for reheating such foods generally requires direct contact with the food, the apparatus becomes contaminated with the food, so that substantial cleaning is required after use to maintain the desired sanitary conditions. This cleaning is time consuming and difficult. It clearly takes time or achieve the desired cleanliness factors in order to thereby provide the required sanitary conditions for service. If the process and apparatus can be developed that can provide for energy efficient and cost efficient heating of the food in such a direct fashion without direct contact with the food by the apparatus, great advantages are obtained--from the reduced cleaning time, let alone the other substantial savings.
It is clear in the prior art that such direct contact of the food by the heating apparatus is required so that the food may be completely and thoroughly heated by the apparatus. Without such direct contact, complete and thorough heating of the food is impossible according to the prior art.
Even when methods and apparatus of quickly heating food are developed, such apparatus prove to be clumsy and difficult to handle. It is very important to provide an apparatus for heating which can be easily loaded with the food to be heated and have the resultant heated food removed therefrom in a simple fashion. Such apparatus does not exist in the prior art at the time.
Thus is can be seen that it is highly important to provide a quick efficient method for heating foods with an apparatus which can be easily cleaned.